"During the N.B.A. finals that began on Thursday, the Biden campaign ran a TV ad titled, 'Flag,' which really mirrors a strategy..."

"... that senior officials described to The New Yorker earlier this year. It’s highly focused on “freedom” conceptually, through the prism of abortion, voting rights and a few other issues. While the issues are definitely longstanding Democratic priorities, if you watch it, the solemn patriotic tone of the ad feels a little old school Republican to me — it’s an interesting artifact of how things have changed. Biden is running to preserve rights and freedoms, or, through another lens, conserve the old ways."

Writes Katherine Miller, in "This Year, It’s Democrats Who Are Waving the Flag of Freedom" (NYT).

This gets my "left-or-right ambiguity" tag. 

Where was I just reading that displaying a flag by your front door was the equivalent of a sign saying We're voting for Trump? 

Here's the ad:

Did you notice how opposition to gun rights fit the rhetoric of freedom? It's "the freedom for our children to be safe from gun violence."

The New Yorker article, from last March, is "Joe Biden’s Last Campaign/Trailing Trump in polls and facing doubts about his age, the President voices defiant confidence in his prospects for reëlection" by Evan Osnos. I started to read it, and when I got to the line "Biden, always a little taller than you expect," I knew I'd blogged it at the time. Here. Before reading my old post, I was getting ready to make a large-boulder-the-size-of-a-small-boulder joke, but then I saw that's what I did at the time:

I paused over "always a little taller than you expect." It had a bit of a large-boulder-the-size-of-a-small-boulder feeling about it. It gets my favorite tag: big and small. I love these conundrums of size. Osnos is using "you" to refer to himself. He's talking about his subjective experience, and he — unlike, probably, you — has been in the vicinity of the President on multiple occasions. But what is this taller and taller effect? It must be that when he's around Biden, he's struck that Biden is a little tall, and, afterwards, Biden shrinks in Osnos's memory, setting him up to be struck once again, at the next encounter, by the slight tallness of Biden.

But here's the part of the New Yorker article about the Biden campaign's high concept of freedom:

Mike Donilon... the “high priest of Bidenism”... has worked with Biden off and on since 1981, longer than nearly any other member of his inner circle. In the 2020 election, it was Donilon who spurred Biden on, helping to shape the campaign around the concept of a “battle for the soul of a nation.”.... That experience fortified his belief that this year’s campaign should center on what he calls “the freedom agenda.”.... 

It’s easy to miss how unusual a “freedom agenda” is for a Democratic Presidential campaign. Since the nineteen-sixties, Republicans have held fast to the language of freedom—from the backlash against civil rights to the Tea Party to the Freedom Caucus. But Democrats have been trying to convince the public that the Republican Party under Trump has transformed into the “maga movement,” an authoritarian crusade bent on dominion. Donilon said, “At its heart, it doesn’t believe in the Constitution, doesn’t believe in law, embraces violence.” He sees an opportunity for Democrats to be “in a place where they usually aren’t.” They can lay claim to the freedom to “choose your own health-care decisions, the freedom to vote, the freedom for your kids to be free of gun violence in school, the freedom for seniors to live in dignity.”

The idea of wrapping the 2024 campaign around this kind of high concept is divisive in Democratic circles. “I’m pretty certain in Scranton they’re not sitting around their dinner table talking about democracy every night,” David Axelrod told me. “The Republican message is: The world’s out of control and Biden’s not in command. That’s the entire message—Trump, the strongman, is the solution. I think you have to be thinking about how you counter that, and how you deal with fears about Biden’s condition.”...

It's 3 months closer to the election, and the party is going with Donilon's idea and the NYT is damning it with the faint praise "an interesting artifact."

Donilon is undeterred....